Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Iran: Have We Got an Incident For You

"Our Iran intelligence shows that the threat to the U.S. is this big"

That naughty but prescient Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo is engaging readers on what he terms "prospective journalism," in this case an "Iran incident" that provokes a U.S. military attack.

Asks Josh:

"Will it be a real incident in Iraq for which the Iranians are blamed? Or will it be a complete bogus incident, something that never happened, that they're blamed for? Will we receive the news in manufactured evidence? Or will it all come through unnamed leaks and Richard Perle appearances on CNN?"

Here are some key requirements:

* Despite being fake, the incident must seem reasonably credible.

* It must appear serious enough that discounting its importance would be feckless.

* It must place most Americans in the position of approving of a war against Iran at the time and place of his choosing.

* Finally, it will take quite a while for the incident to be revealed as bogus.

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About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.